More Adventures with USB keys under Linux

Previously:
- Manually mounting
- Manually setting permissions to read/write

Today, creating live-USB discs, and manual reformatting.

It began like this. The screen on my laptop broke. Big stripe from top to bottom, width of the hinge, all gone white. But that was okay, I took out the five year insurance, so off it went for repair. This left me with just my EEE netbook. It had a nicely functioning Fedora 11, but it's coming to the end of it's life now. I didn't want to upgrade to 12 before as I felt they were trying too many new things all at once. And I'm apprehensive of the new bootloader. But now with 13 they've had time to get it all working nicely. Time to take the leap.

I looked up the options. Upgrading seemed attractive. preupgrade looks fairly shiney, but my /boot partition was too small at the previously recommended 200MB, and my router is in a really awkward place to enable me to sit plugged into it for a while. So, other options, upgrade from media, install from live media. I didn't have any blank CDs or DVDs handy (I've an external DVD-drive so that's not a problem for my EEE), so I thought I'd try out the Live CD on USB thing. But the live CDs don't upgrade, only install. And sure, they've changed the recommended partitions, /boot is now 500MB, and /home gets its own. Okay, why not, let's give it a go.

Well, the good news is the images came down quickly. The rest is a bit of a saga.

( A bit of a ramble )

In summary, I don't know why I had these problems when others don't seem to. Every program I used was Fedora based. The only thing I can think of is that the USB drive was NTFS before I reformatted it for the first time. Or that the instructions are incomplete. But, what I learned is how to manually use mkfs and that (by default at least) it doesn't assign a label. Also, I'll think I'll stick to DVDs in the future.

NetworkManager, WPA networks, Fedora 13, EEE 1000H

(The install from the full installation DVD went perfectly!)

Fedora 13 does appear to have drivers that work for my awkward wireless card (kmod-rt2860). I can see the available networks, and I can attempt to connect to them. But there is where it falls down. It isn't authenticating against the network, it just continually asks me for the passphrase. I've seen this behaviour before, on many different versions of Fedora, on many different laptops. But never for my home network before. For some reason NetworkManager just randomly decides not to like some networks. And different ones on different machines at that. The only thing they have in common is WPA security. The internet isn't yielding any useful information. I'm wondering if anyone here has come across this before? Can they point me towards a solution? Broken wireless on a netbook is grounds for changing distro.